Sunday, March 20, 2005

Amit had posted before on Donald Knuth's near-completion of Volume Four of The Art of Computer Programming. There was a wonderful story on him on NPR earlier this week, where you can hear Knuth talk about his book.

From Don Knuth's page on The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford :

At the end of 1999, these books were named among the best twelve physical-science monographs of the century by American Scientist, along with: Dirac on quantum mechanics, Einstein on relativity, Mandelbrot on fractals, Pauling on the chemical bond, Russell and Whitehead on foundations of mathematics, von Neumann and Morgenstern on game theory, Wiener on cybernetics, Woodward and Hoffmann on orbital symmetry, Feynman on quantum electrodynamics, Smith on the search for structure, and Einstein's collected papers.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Reuben mentioned Google Desktop Search when it came out in Beta. Google Desktop Search is now out of Beta. The security concerns raised at the time of Beta's launch have been addressed - password-protected documents and other secure content on the computer are not indexed. Also, users can disallow indexing of content from secure web-sites. GDS comes with an SDK for developers to extend support, and has been released on Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Google has heavy competition in the consumer desktop arena. Not only have its top rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, introduced similar tools recently, but a litany of upstarts have emerged to compete for Web surfers' attention. Some are even having success; Blinkx said Friday that its desktop-search tool is now fielding 100 million searches daily.

All the search companies are hoping to lock in new visitors with desktop applications because they believe it will help them drive more Web searches--and hence more advertising sales. Search-related advertising is expected to be worth between $4 billion and $5 billion this year.

Microsoft should be able to achieve tighter integration as they own the platform and the APIs, greater flexibility as they can probably better index Office and other file types, and perhaps also faster searching, since their search and file system components can integrate better. Desktop search is still anybody's game.

In other developments, it was pleasing to see Google's new weather service. You can now type the keyword "weather" followed by city and state information (or zip code) to get weather and weather-related search information on the area. When will Google integrate their weather, news and other services into a, um...., portal?

Has this blog moved? Where to?

In a word, yes. To the "Ask the Delphic Oracle" blog. Delfikorakle is my (Anand Manikutty's) old, now partially deconstructed, weblog.

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I have been blogging since around 2002 when the blogging phenomenon was just starting to take off. A few years into blogging, I found that thoughtful posts and commenting was exactly my thing, and so I took up blogging with enthusiasm. I later joined the group blog Zoo Station. Our blog Zoo Station won the IndieBloggies Award in 2004. I no longer blog there, and have since moved to the group blog "Ask the Delphic Oracle".

Now that blogging is mainstream, it seems like a good idea to keep around a time capsule of previous posts, and so Delfikorakle continues to be maintained. I started out on Delfikorakle making posts on technology and computer science since those were my chief research interests. Please note that my research interests have now shifted to include organization behavior, technology management and strategic management. View my new blog for recent posts. It is available at : http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com/